Candidates helped highlight where MK Dons fell short last season

Most of the candidates Pete Winkelman interviewed for the head coach role at MK Dons delivered their verdicts on what went wrong at the club last season.

Having gone from missing out on automatic promotion to the Championship by a single point in 2022, the team from MK1 made wholesale changes in the summer but were relegated to League Two a year later.

Winkelman, who hired Graham Alexander to lead the charge to get back into the third tier next season, said a lot of those he interviewed said the lack of options in the squad was ultimately Dons’ biggest weakness as they went down, and that this summer’s recruitment drive would look to fix those problems.

He said: “Everyone told me what they told me what they thought was wrong with the club and what we'd done, and we got those objective third party views. And there was a consistency in what they highlighted with the make-up of our team.

“You'll start to see the sort of squad we're trying to assemble for next year, and those signs will be encouraging, and will give us some confidence that we're going in the right direction.”

And that right direction, according to the chairman, has to be a battle for promotion to get back into League One. That though, he admits, will be a tough task given the clubs also vying for promotion.

“League Two is not an easy division, you can't snap your fingers and get out of it,” he continued. “There are some really big teams - Stockport, Salford, Bradford. Mansfield didn't even make the play-offs and Nigel Clough is a terrific manager at this level.

“And when you add the vibe of Wrexham to the mix, there will bea lot of attention on League Two, and of course we know Luke Williams really well at Notts County.

“We've got our work cut out for us. But I think we'll have a competitive team, with a bank of people who have a lot to prove after last season.”